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 early access

Symmetric predicates and the semantics of reciprocal

alternations*
Yoad Winter
Utrecht University

Abstract Reciprocal alternations appear with binary predicates that also have a
collective unary form. Many of these binary predicates are symmetric: if A dated
B then B dated A. Most symmetric predicates in English show a simple kind of
reciprocity: A and B dated means “A dated B”, or equivalently “B dated A”. Similar
observations hold for nouns and adjectives like cousin and identical. Non-symmetric
predicates like hug, fight and kiss also show reciprocity, but of a more complex kind.
For instance, the meaning of A and B hugged differs substantially from “A hugged B
and/or B hugged A”. Addressing a wide range of reciprocal predicates, we observe
that “plain” reciprocity only appears with symmetric predicates, while other types of
reciprocity only appear with non-symmetric predicates. This Reciprocity-Symmetry
Generalization motivates a lexical operator that derives symmetric predicates from
collective meanings. By contrast, reciprocity with non-symmetric predicates is ana-
lyzed using “soft” preferences of predicate concepts. Developing work by Dowty
and Rappaport-Hovav & Levin, we introduce a formal semantic notion of protopred-
icates, which mediates between lexical meanings and concepts. This mechanism
explains symmetry and reciprocity as two semantic aspects of one type system at
the lexical-conceptual interface.

Keywords: symmetry, reciprocity, predicate, alternation, lexical semantics

* Special thanks to Joost Zwarts and Christopher Piñon for extensive comments and discussions,
and to Louise McNally and three S&P reviewers for careful and constructive comments. Many
thanks go to Sophie Chesney and Heidi Klockmann for their help with English judgements. I’m also
grateful to Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Robyn Berghoff, Sofia Bimpikou, Luca Bischetti, Chris Collins,
Naama Friedmann, James Hampton, Elly Koutamanis, Marcus Kracht, Imke Kruitwagen, Barbara
Landau, Denis Paperno, Eva Poortman, Dana Seggev, Yael Seggev, Uri Sharoni, Eleni Tsouloucha,
Carien Westenbroek, Roberto Zamparelli, Ede Zimmermann and Shalom Zuckerman, as well to
audiences at Utrecht University, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC, Rovereto), University of
Vienna, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Hebrew University, Goethe University Frankfurt,
Bielefeld University, the workshop “Referential Semantics One Step Further” (ESSLLI 2016, Free
University of Bozen-Bolzano), and the Syntax and Semantics Conference (CSSP 2015, Paris). The
illustrations in Figure 1 are by Ruth Noy Shapira. Work on this research was partially funded by a
VICI grant 277-80-002 of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and a grant
of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme (grant agreement no. 742204). All errors and misconceptions are mine.
 Winter

1 Introduction
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A binary predicate R is standardly called symmetric if for every x and y, the state-
ment R(x,y) is logically equivalent to R(y,x). The following equivalent sentences
exemplify symmetric predication in English:
(1) a. Sue dated Dan ⇔ Dan dated Sue.
b. Shape A is identical to Shape B ⇔ Shape B is identical to Shape A.
c. Mary is John’s cousin ⇔ John is Mary’s cousin.
Most symmetric predicates in English have systematic morphosyntactic relations
with collective predicates. For instance, the binary predicates in (1a-c) all have
unary-collective alternates, as exemplified below:
(2) a. Sue and Dan dated.
b. Shape A and Shape B are identical.
c. Mary and John are cousins.
We say that predicates like date, identical and cousin show a reciprocal diathesis
alternation (Levin 1993). Accordingly, the collective predicates in (2) are classified
as reciprocal.
Symmetries as in (1) reflect a semantic property that may in principle appear
with any binary predicate. Reciprocal alternations only concern predicates whose
morphosyntax supports multiple subcategorization frames. Given this, it is remark-
able that the great majority of symmetric predicates in English take part in reciprocal
alternations.1 This fact calls for an explanation: why should logical symmetry of
binary predicates be such a good predictor of their morphosyntactic relations with
collective predicates? This question constitutes the first major challenge of this paper.
When dealing with this challenge, we also need to look at non-symmetric pred-
icates.2 A considerable class of such predicates alternate with collective unary
predicates, similarly to the symmetric predicates above. Consider for example the
following collective sentences:
(3) Sue and Dan hugged/fought/collided.
The binary counterparts of the intransitive verbs in (3) all denote non-symmetric
predicates. For instance, a person can surely hug someone or something without
being hugged back. This lack of logical symmetry explains familiar contrasts like the
drunkard hugged the lamppost vs. #the lamppost hugged the drunkard (Dong 1971,
1 Only a handful of English predicates show symmetry without having a reciprocal alternate: near, far
from and resemble are notable examples, discussed in section 2.6.
2 Non-symmetric simply means “not symmetric”. The term asymmetric is reserved for binary predicates
like taller than, where R(x,y) entails the negation of R(y,x).

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referring to Noam Chomsky, p.c.). The same semantic consideration also explains

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subject-object asymmetries in sentences like the fireman fought the fire or the driver
collided with the bridge.
Previous works have proposed different analyses of reciprocal predicates like
hug, fight, and collide, connecting them with various notions of “symmetry” (Gleit-
man et al. 1996, Carlson 1998, Dimitriadis 2008). However, there is no general
account of the prominence of standard logical symmetry among the reciprocal
forms, and its effects on the semantics of lexical reciprocity. Addressing these puz-
zles, we first show a distinction between the reciprocal alternations that appear
with symmetric predicates and those that appear with non-symmetric predicates.
Reciprocal alternations with symmetric predicates like date have a simple semantic
description. A sentence like Sue and Dan dated means pretty much the same as Sue
dated Dan or, equivalently, Dan dated Sue. This is summarized below:
(4) Sue and Dan dated ⇔ Sue dated Dan (Dan dated Sue).
When reciprocal predicates show this equivalence, we refer to them as plain re-
ciprocals. Non-symmetric verbs like hug show a different type of reciprocity. As
has been previously observed, collective sentences like Sue and Dan hugged should
semantically be distinguished from statements like Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged
Sue. To see the difference, suppose that Sue hugged Dan when he was asleep, and
later, he hugged her when she was asleep. In this scenario, the sentence Sue hugged
Dan and Dan hugged Sue is true, but the sentence Sue and Dan hugged is not.
Thus, by contrast to equivalence (4), with the verb hug we observe the following
non-equivalence:
(5) Sue and Dan hugged ⇔
/ Sue hugged Dan (and Dan hugged Sue).
As we will see, failures of such equivalences with non-symmetric predicates occur
in more semantic circumstances than what has been previously observed, further
beyond what is illustrated by the separate time intervals in the example above.
The contrast in reciprocity between date and hug in (4)-(5) illustrates a general
phenomenon, which we call the Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization: symmet-
ric predicates exhibit plain reciprocity, whereas non-symmetric predicates do not.
This generalization supports a distinction between two different principles about
reciprocal alternations:

P1. Meanings of symmetric predicates are logically derived from the collective
meanings of their reciprocal alternates.
P2. Meanings of non-symmetric binary predicates and their collective alternates are
not mutually definable, but are connected to each other by a lexical strategy
of reciprocal polysemy.

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We show that P1 leads us to expect the coupling between plain reciprocity and
symmetry, whereas P2 sanctions more complex forms of reciprocity with non-
symmetric predicates.
Principles P1 and P2 are implemented in a semantic system of protopredicates:
typed predicates at an abstract level that connects lexical predicate meanings with
concepts. This system allows us to formally capture the semantic distinctions that
are relevant for the grammar of reciprocal predicates, and derive the Reciprocity-
Symmetry Generalization as a corollary. As clarified by recent experimental results
in Kruitwagen et al. 2017, the reciprocal polysemy of non-symmetric verbs like
hug, fight and collide is profitably described using preferential connections between
two different senses of these verbs. The general picture that emerges informs our
understanding of the interface between concepts and linguistic predicates. According
to this emerging view, the formal semantics of protopredicates fully encodes “hard”
logical relations. By contrast, “soft” preferential connections between predicate
meanings are only represented by semantic types, and the full semantic interpretation
of the polysemy is obtained by systems of language use, especially those governing
the use of concepts.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 develops principle P1 above about
the lexical relations between plain reciprocity and logical symmetry. Section 3
analyzes reciprocal polysemy in the semantics of non-plain alternations with non-
symmetric binary predicates, thus elaborating principle P2. Section 4 introduces the
formal notion of protopredicates and uses it to account for the Reciprocity-Symmetry
Generalization.

2 Plain reciprocity and truth-conditional symmetry

This section focuses on collective sentences like A and B dated, which are equiv-
alent to A dated B and B dated A. It is argued that such equivalences are logically
independent of symmetry, although empirically they go hand in hand with it: non-
symmetric predicates like transitive hug show a more complex kind of reciprocity.
To account for this pattern, it is proposed that the basic lexical meaning of symmetric
binary predicates in English is unary-collective. Symmetry follows directly from
this assumption, which explains why English symmetric predicates have collective
alternates, and why they only show a simple type of reciprocity. Furthermore, this
analysis suggests a potential universal about natural language lexicons: symmetry
is not an accidental semantic feature of binary predicates, but appears by virtue of
their underlying collectivity. Some preliminary evidence from Greek and Hebrew are
shown to support this conjecture, and suggest a general method for testing it further.

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2.1 Plain reciprocity

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Many reciprocal alternations support a simple semantic relation between the two
forms of the predicate, as illustrated by the following equivalences:
(6) A and B dated ⇔ A dated B and B dated A
A and B are cousins ⇔ A is B’s cousin and B is A’s cousin
A and B are similar ⇔ A is similar to B and B is similar to A
Thus, the reciprocal sentences A&B dated/are cousins/are similar only hold in
situations where the relevant binary predicate — transitive date, cousin of, similar
to — bidirectionally holds between A and B. Such observations have led previous
works to employ various informal notions of “symmetry” for describing recipro-
cal alternations. This terminology confuses reciprocity — a linguistic phenomenon
that occurs with certain collective predicates — with the standard logical notion of
symmetry, which only applies to binary predicates. To avoid this terminological
confusion, we refer to alternations that support equivalences as in (6) as plain re-
ciprocal (plainR) alternations. The term symmetry is standardly used as a property
of binary predicates.
To characterize plain reciprocity in general terms, let us introduce some semantic
notation. Let E =/ ∅ be a domain of singular entities, and let P be a unary-collective
predicate ranging over sums of entities in E.3 Let R be a binary predicate alternating
with P, ranging over pairs of entities in E.4 The equivalences in (6) are formally
described by the following definition:5

(7) Plain reciprocity (plainR):

For all x,y ∈ E such that x =/ y∶ P(x+y) ⇔ R(x,y) ∧ R(y,x)

In words: the predicates P and R are in plain reciprocity if for any sum x+y of two
different singular entities, P holds of x+y if and only if R holds between x and y
in both directions. Note that this does not mean that the predicate R is symmetric:
it only means that R holds “symmetrically” between the x’s and y’s that satisfy
3 Formally, these pluralities are assumed to come from a domain isomorphic to {A ⊆ E ∶ ∣A∣ ≥ 2}: the
subsets of E with cardinality 2 or more. The + operator in definition (7) is the commutative operator
mapping pairs of singular/plural entities to their sums, which can be thought of as set unions. Thus,
the sum x+y of two different entities x,y ∈ E can be thought of as the doubleton {x,y}. For further
technical details see Winter & Scha 2015.
4 This should be generalized for predicates with more arguments. For instance: the verb mix in Dan
mixed the flour and the sugar is a binary predicate with a collective object argument, which alternates
with mix . . . with in Dan mixed the flour with the sugar — a ternary predicate between entities. This
point does not affect the generality of our proposed account.
5 Definition (7) uses event-free denotations of predicates, which are sufficient for our purposes here.
The analysis in Sections 3-4 will extend this definition by using events.

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P(x+y). For other x’s and y’s, the predicate R may hold “asymmetrically”: in one
direction only. Thus, from a logical point of view, the binary predicates R that satisfy
Definition (7) with some collective P might be symmetric or non-symmetric. This
point is discussed further in section 2.3.

Relational verbs: date, marry, get married (to)

Verbs of interaction: meet (with), fight (with), talk (with), make love (with)∗
Sharing: share NP (with)
Connections: cross,† match, rhyme, connected (to), united (with), differ
(from)
Relational nouns: sister,‡ brother, sibling, twin, cousin, friend, lover, neigh-
bour, colleague, compatriot, penpal, synonym, antonym
Relational adjectives: (dis)similar, identical, parallel, complementary, equiva-
lent, equal, adjacent, synonymous, antonymous
∗
these verbs also show non-plain alternations with binary predicates (transitive fight, talk to, make
love to and possibly transitive meet) — see sections 3 and 4
†
on the verb cross, see note 11
‡
on gender-sensitive relational nouns like sister and brother, see section 2.2

Table 1 Plain reciprocal predicates

Definition (7) together with the equivalences in (6) characterize the predicates
date, cousin and similar as plain reciprocals. Table 1 gives more plain alternations
of this type. When considering these alternations, it is useful to keep in mind the
following points:

i. Definition (7) assumes a standard semantics of plurals, where a conjunction

like Sue and Dan denotes a sum of entities s+d. The commutativity of the
sum-formation operator means that collective sentences like Sue and Dan
dated are standardly analyzed as equivalent to Dan and Sue dated.
ii. Definition (7) makes use of collective predication over duos like Sue and
Dan, ignoring reciprocal sentences with trios or bigger collections, as in Sue,
Dan and Sam are cousins. The semantic relation between such sentences and
binary predicates like cousin of will be addressed in more detail in subsection
2.5.
iii. The predicate P in Definition (7) is the collective-reciprocal meaning of the
unary form. With intransitive hug there is no distributive interpretation, as
witnessed by the unacceptability of strings like ?Sue hugged. However, many
other reciprocal predicates also have a distributive reading. For instance, Dan

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and Sue talked can be interpreted reciprocally, but also distributively: “Dan

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talked, and Sue talked as well”. We assume that such distributive uses are
distinct from the reciprocal-collective use, and ignore them in Definition (7)
and the rest of this paper.6
iv. Some reciprocal predicates have two or more binary forms. In such cases,
each of these forms may show a different kind of alternation with the unary
entry. For instance, the construction talk with is arguably in a plain alternation
with intransitive talk, although the construction talk to is not (see below).

As mentioned in the introduction, previous work on lexical reciprocity has made

it clear that equivalences as in (6) do not hold with all reciprocal alternations.
For instance, let us reconsider the the verb hug. We look at a scenario where Sue
hugged Dan in his sleep, and then Dan hugged Sue in her sleep. In such a scenario,
the collective sentence Sue and Dan hugged may be false when the two transitive
sentences are true in different time coordinates. This fact is summarized in the
following non-equivalence:
(8) Sue and Dan hugged ⇔
/ Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged Sue
A considerable class of predicates behave like hug in this respect. This includes pairs
of verbal forms like collide (with), talk (to), in/transitive kiss and fight, as well as
stative constructions like be in love (with). In Section 3 we will get back to reciprocal
alternations that show this behavior.

2.2 Truth-conditional symmetry and presuppositional non-symmetry

When considering binary forms of plainR predicates as in Table 1, we see that

symmetric predicates are highly prominent among them. For example, if Sue dated
Dan, then he dated her as well; if Sue’s skirt matches her jacket, then her jacket
also matches her skirt; if Sue is Dan’s cousin, then he is her cousin too. When
characterizing such binary predicates as “symmetric”, we rely on equivalences like
the following (=(1a)):
(9) Sue dated Dan ⇔ Dan dated Sue
The claim that such pairs of sentences are “equivalences” invites some elab-
oration. The sentences in (9) are not equivalent in their implications about Sue’s
6 Teasing apart reciprocal readings from distributive readings requires some semantic tests. For instance,
Dan and Sue haven’t talked for ages can be true when the two people haven’t talked to each other,
but each of them has constantly talked to other people. Here the reciprocal reading is true while
the distributive reading is false, which is evidence for ambiguity (or polysemy) of talk between two
senses.

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and Dan’s capacities or statures from the point of view of the speaker. However,
these sentences have the same truth-conditions: they are both true in situations where
Sue and Dan went out on dates with each other, and false otherwise. Similarly,
Podolsky collaborated with Einstein is a natural way to highlight the contribution of
the physicist Boris Podolsky for work on the EPR paradox. Einstein collaborated
with Podolsky may sound stylistically odd in such contexts, but both sentences are
factually true and are classified as truth-conditionally equivalent. The same holds
for familiar examples like North Korea is similar to China and China is similar
to North Korea (Tversky 1977). Such apparent “asymmetries” are commonly re-
lated to Figure-Ground effects, or other non-truth-conditional phenomena (Talmy
1975, 2000). Accordingly, we stick to the standard classification of predicates like
date, collaborate with and similar to as truth-conditionally symmetric (Dowty 1991,
Gleitman et al. 1996).
Most plainR alternations in English involve this kind of truth-conditional sym-
metry. However, with one type of of English predicates, plain alternations appear
without symmetry. These are relational nouns like sister and brother, which are sensi-
tive to the gender of their referent. Reciprocity with these predicates is characterized
as plain due to equivalences like the following:
(10) Kim and Hillary are sisters
⇔ Kim is Hillary’s sister and Hillary is Kim’s sister
However, the relational noun sister (of) is not symmetric. Consider for instance the
following sentences:
(11) a. Kim is Hillary’s sister.
b. Hillary is Kim’s sister.
Sentence (11a) requires that Kim is a female whereas (11b) does not. Conversely,
(11b) requires that Hillary is a female but (11a) does not. What can we make of this
non-symmetry?
Among the relational nouns that have a reciprocal alternate, gender-sensitivity is
the only recognized factor that leads to non-symmetry.7 This exceptional status of
nouns like sister and brother led Schwarz (2006) and Partee (2008) to look in some
7 For instance: (i) Gender-insensitive relational nouns like friend and neighbor have reciprocal variants
and are symmetric; (ii) Other gender-insensitive relational nouns like ancestor or boss are non-
symmetric, but do not have a reciprocal alternate (wit. the absence of a reciprocal reading in we are
ancestors/bosses). Besides sister and brother, the only cases of non-symmetric reciprocal nouns that I
know in English are the compounds sister-in-law and brother-in-law, as well as girlfriend, boyfriend,
wife and husband, when the latter are also adapted to gay couples. Like sister, the plural uses of these
nouns all show plain reciprocity, while their binary forms are not symmetric. For instance, H&K
are girlfriends shows plainR, but H is K’s girlfriend does not show symmetry: it requires H to be a
female but doesn’t have this requirement for K.

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detail into their semantics. Schwarz and Partee propose that the non-symmetry of

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such nouns is not truth-conditional, but results from a gender presupposition. Thus,
sentences (11a-b) are analyzed as follows:
(12) a. Kim is Hillary’s sister
Asserted: Kim is Hillary’s sibling
Presupposed: Kim is a female
b. Hillary is Kim’s sister
Asserted: Hillary is Kim’s sibling
Presupposed: Hillary is a female
Under this analysis, the truth-conditions of sentences like (12a) and (12b) are as-
sumed to be the same. Accordingly, we refer to the nouns sister and brother as
truth-conditionally symmetric.8 The non-symmetry exhibited by (12a) and (12b) is
analyzed as a result of a presupposition that targets one argument but not the other.
We say that in the construction Kim’s sister, the gender presupposition concerns the
“referential argument”: the entity that the complex NP’s denotes. This presupposition
does not concern the “possessor” Kim. In sum:
(13) Gender presupposition of relational nouns: Gender sensitive reciprocal
nouns like sister and brother are truth-conditionally symmetric. Their non-
symmetry follows from a gender presupposition on the referential argument.
Schwarz and Partee do not analyze collective sentences like Kim and Hillary are
sisters (10). However, the analysis in (13) also applies to such sentences. The only
difference from the case of sister of is that the referential argument of a plural noun
like sisters is now a sum rather than a singular entity. We get the following analysis:
(14) Kim and Hillary are sisters
Asserted: Kim and Hillary are siblings
Presupposed: Kim and Hillary are females
Under this analysis, sentence (14) is truth-conditionally equivalent to the conjunction
of the two sentences in (12a-b). The truth-conditional import of the noun sister(s) is
assumed to be identical to the gender-neutral noun sibling(s), which supports the
following plainR equivalence:
(15) Kim and Hillary are siblings
⇔ Kim is Hillary’s sibling and Hillary is Kim’s sibling
8 Schwarz calls this kind of symmetry Strawson symmetry, adopting von Fintel’s (1999) terminology of
“Strawson entailments”: entailments that hold between sentences provided that their presuppositions
are satisfied.

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When we factor out gender presuppositions in this way, the reciprocity of the sister
alternation is analyzed as plain like the alternation with the noun sibling.
Moving away from English to languages with grammatical gender, we see that
principle (13) is also suitable as a general principle describing the behavior of gender-
marked relational expressions. In Hebrew, a language with grammatical gender, all
relational predicates (verbs, nouns and adjectives) must be gender-marked according
to the grammatical gender of their referential argument. When a predicate refers to
an animate object, gender marking has the expected semantic implications for the
gender of the referent. For example, let us consider the following Hebrew sentences:
(16) a. yuval doma le tal
Yuval similar-fem. to Tal
“Yuval (female) is similar to Tal (gender unspecified)”
Asserted: Yuval is similar to Tal
Presupposed: Yuval is a female
b. tal dome le yuval
Tal similar-masc. to Yuval
“Tal (male) is similar to Yuval (gender unspecified)”
Asserted: Tal is similar to Yuval
Presupposed: Tal is a male
The names Yuval and Tal are contemporarily given to both males and females. A
feminine/masculine agreement on the adjective as in sentences (16a/b) specifies
Yuval/Tal as a female/male, respectively. The analyses in (16) illustrate how principle
(13) accounts for the semantic effects of gender in these sentences. When using this
principle, gender as in doma/dome is not treated as part of the core meaning of the
word, which is just gender-neutral “similar”. In this way, the truth-conditions of
sentences (16a) and (16b) are assumed to be the same. However, the morphology of
the predicate induces a gender presupposition, which leads to a different semantic
import in each sentence despite the identical core meaning of the main predicate.
Using this analysis we treat both the feminine and the masculine forms of the
adjective in (16a-b) as truth-conditionally symmetric, similar to sister and brother in
English. Grammatical gender in Hebrew leads to many other cases of presupposi-
tional non-symmetry with binary predicates that are otherwise symmetric. Similarly
to English, the overwhelming majority of such truth-conditionally symmetric predi-
cates have a reciprocal form, which is analyzed as a plain reciprocal. For instance,
consider the following sentence:
(17) tal ve-yuval domot
Tal and-Yuval similar-fem.pl.
“Tal and Yuval (both of them female) are similar”

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Asserted: Tal and Yuval are similar

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Presupposed: Tal and Yuval are females
The assertion in sentence (17) is analyzed as an equivalent to the assertions in
(16a) and (16b). Accordingly, the reciprocal alternation of the adjective doma/dome
(“similar-fem./masc.”) is analyzed as plain despite the semantic effects of gender.9
In sum, following Schwarz and Partee, I propose that the non-symmetry of
gender-sensitive reciprocal predicates like sister/brother is presuppositional, al-
though truth-conditionally, these predicates are symmetric. This explains the ex-
ceptional non-symmetry of gender-sensitive nouns among the reciprocal nouns in
English, and offers a clear division of labor between gender agreement and the
truth-conditional semantics of predicates in languages with grammatical gender.10

2.3 The Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization

Among the binary predicates in English that are intuitively symmetric, the great
majority have reciprocal alternates. This observation has constantly fascinated the-
oretical linguists since the 1960s. With our notions of truth-conditional symmetry
and plain reciprocity, we can now be more precise about the connection between the
two. The characterization of plain alternations in Section 2.1 reveals that symmetric
predicates only alternate with plain reciprocals. Furthermore, Section 2.2 argued that
from a truth-conditional perspective, the opposite is true as well: plain reciprocal
alternations only appear with symmetric predicates. This generalization is formally
stated below:
(18) Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization (RSG): A reciprocal alternation be-
tween a unary-collective predicate P and a binary predicate R is plain if and
only if R is truth-conditionally symmetric.
According to the RSG, truth-conditionally symmetric predicates like the verb date
or the noun sister show plain reciprocity with their collective alternates. Conversely,
non-symmetric binary predicates like hug fail to show plain reciprocity with their
9 Some further intricacies affect the semantics of gender-marked plurals in Hebrew. Notably, if one
of the conjuncts is masculine, Hebrew speakers tend to use masculine plural agreement, e.g. domim
(similar-masc.pl.) or axim (brother-masc.pl.). This makes a sentence like Yuval ve-Tal domim/axim
(“Yuval and-Tal are similar/brother-masc.pl.”) mean: “Yuval and Tal are similar/siblings, and at least
one of them is a male”. We analyze the gender-marked predicate domim/axim as truth-conditionally
identical to “similar/siblings”. The implication “at least one of them is a male” is analyzed as a gender
presupposition.
10 See Schwarz 2006 for further arguments regarding the gender presupposition of sister/brother in
English. For the more general issue, see Zamparelli 2008, Percus 2011, Sudo 2012. Despite their
different proposals, the main conclusions of these works are consistent with the non-truth-conditional
analysis of gender that is advocated by Schwarz.

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collective alternates. Indeed, as we saw in (8), the hug alternation is not plain. As
we will see in Section 3, this is the case with virtually all other non-symmetric
predicates that have reciprocal alternates.11
What principles can help us to account for the RSG? Before addressing this ques-
tion, the first thing to note is that the RSG is by no means a logical necessity. Thus,
we can construct hypothetical languages where symmetric predicates show non-plain
alternations, or where non-symmetric predicates participate in plain alternations.
Let us demonstrate the latter scenario by considering a simple example in natural
language.12 In this example we use the reciprocal expression each other. This kind
of reciprocals involves quantification in complex constructions, hence it is largely
orthogonal to our current study of lexical predicates.13 However, for the purpose of
the current discussion, each other helps us observe a logical point about symmetry
and plain reciprocity. Suppose that R is a non-symmetric binary predicate without
any reciprocal alternate in the lexicon. The complex expression “R each other” is
usually in a plain alternation with R. For instance, consider the transitive verb thank.
This verb has no intransitive form, let alone one with a reciprocal interpretation.
11 In English, the only potential exception I know to the RSG is the verb cross (and in some dialects,
intersect). The sentence the road crosses the town does not entail #the town crosses the road, hence
transitive cross is not symmetric. Yet, A and B cross means the same as A crosses B and B crosses A,
hence the cross alternation is plain. Whether this one case challenges the RSG is unclear, however,
since x crosses y may involve two different meanings: “x passes across y” and “x forms a crossing
with y”. Only the latter meaning has a reciprocal alternate (wit. the unacceptability of the road and
the town cross). In Hebrew, these two senses are expressed by different binary verbal constructions: a
non-symmetric xacah (‘divide, cut, halve, cross, bisect’) vs. a symmetric hictalev im ‘form a cross
with’. Only the latter verb has a reciprocal entry, which is in a plain alternation with the binary use.
I hypothesize that the non-symmetric use of English cross in the road crosses the town reflects a
separate sense, which does not have any reciprocal alternate. If correct, this hypothesis removes the
challenge for the RSG.
12 Using artificial examples we can illustrate both scenarios. For instance, let us use hug1 and hug2 to
denote the unary/binary meanings of the verb hug. Assuming a hypothetical verb *Xhug, we make up
the following artificial unary/binary meanings:
Xhug1 (x+y) = hug2 (x,y) ∧ hug2 (y,x)
Xhug2 (x,y) = Xhug2 (y,x) = hug1 (x+y)
By definition, intransitive *Xhug is now in plainR with the non-symmetric transitive hug. Further,
as we saw, Sue and Dan hugged means something different than Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged
Sue. Consequently, although transitive *Xhug is by definition symmetric, it is not in plainR with
intransitive *Xhug.
13 Expressions like each other appear as arguments of virtually all binary predicates. For some works
that study such reciprocals, see Dalrymple et al. 1998, Kerem et al. 2011, Sabato & Winter 2012,
Mari 2014, Poortman et al. 2018. The possible relations between lexical reciprocity as in they hugged
and quantificational reciprocity as in they hugged each other is a complex topic that is still poorly
understood. Studying this problem is supplementary to, and partly dependent on, the main issues of
the present paper.

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However, like all transitive verbs, it combines well with each other. Now let us

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consider the following two sentences:
(19) a. Yesterday, Sue and Dan thanked each other.
b. Yesterday, Sue thanked Dan and Dan thanked Sue.
These sentences are equivalent. This means that the complex predicate thank each
other is in a plain alternation with transitive thank. Transitive thank is not symmetric,
hence the equivalence in (19a-b) refutes the RSG for the complex predicate thank
each other. From a logical perspective, we might expect English to develop a
reciprocal alternation refuting the RSG in the same way. However, as we saw,
this is not the case. Many non-symmetric binary predicates like thank have no
lexical reciprocal alternate whatsoever. Furthermore, arguably, all the non-symmetric
binary predicates that do have reciprocal alternates (e.g. hug) do not support plain
alternations.
The discussion above (and note 12) shows that the RSG, if correct, must be
viewed as a semantic generalization about the lexicon, rather than a logical conse-
quence of some standard notion of reciprocity. To account for the observed linkage
between symmetry and plain reciprocity, we need to study the general principles
that regulate predicate meanings in the lexicon. We will get back to this question in
Section 4, after analyzing more facts about reciprocal alternations.

2.4 Deriving symmetric predicates from collective meanings

In her pioneering transformational account of conjunction and plurality, Gleitman

(1965) proposed that sentences with lexically reciprocal predicates are derived from
sentences with their binary alternates. For instance, Gleitman derives the intransitive
sentence Oxygen and hydrogen combine from the sentence Oxygen and hydrogen
combine with each other. Thus, in Gleitman’s account, binary entries like combine
with are more basic than collective intransitive entries like combine. While such
transformational treatments are no longer in fashion, the idea that binary entries are
semantically more basic than reciprocal entries has persisted. Most works on the
topic assume that the meanings of lexical reciprocals are derived from meanings of
binary predicates in one way or another.14
In the current analysis of plain reciprocity, I follow an alternative approach by
Lakoff & Peters (1969), who proposed a syntactic transformation that derives binary
forms of predicates from unary-collective forms. Similarly, according to the semantic
analysis developed here, predicates that support plain alternations are inherently
14 Dimitriadis (2008), Rubinstein (2009), Siloni (2012) and Bar-Asher Siegal (2015) all propose
mappings from meanings of transitive verbs to meanings of reciprocal verbs. Hackl (2002) is a similar
account of reciprocal nouns.

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collective. Thus, the basic meaning of predicates like combine, date, sister and
similar is assumed to categorize pluralities. For instance, sentence (20a) below is
analyzed as in (20b), where F is the relevant plurality.
(20) a. These films are similar.
b. similar(F)
Works following Gleitman 1965 treat unary lexical entries like similar as having
complex meanings, which are syntactically or semantically derived from the mean-
ings of binary forms like similar to. By contrast, in (20b), as in Lakoff & Peters’s
approach, we treat the collective-reciprocal entry as primary. Thus, the representa-
tion in (20b) has no logical entailments about similarity relations between pairs of
individual films. We will get back to this point about collectivity in Section 2.5.
With plain reciprocals like similar, we logically derive the meaning of the binary
construction from the collective meaning. For instance, the meaning of the binary
predicate similar to is defined as follows:
(21) similar_to = λ x.λ y.similar(x+y)
In words: an entity x is considered similar to an entity y if the sum of x and y is
in the extension of the collective predicate similar. More generally, we adopt the
following formal definition for all binary predicates in plain alternations:
(22) Symmetric image of a collective predicate: Let P be a unary-collective
predicate meaning. The symmetric image of P is the binary predicate R that
is defined as follows:
def
R = λ x.λ y.P(x+y)
Definition (22) accounts for the symmetry of the predicate R as well as for the
semantics of plain alternations. For instance, with the predicate similar, we obtain
the following equivalences for all a and b:

Symmetry:
def def
similar_to(a,b) ⇔ similar(a+b) ⇔ similar(b+a) ⇔ similar_to(b,a)
Plain reciprocity:
similar(a+b) ⇔ similar_to(a,b) ∧ similar_to(b,a)

The same holds for all binary predicates that are derived by (22).
Lakoff & Peters’s original rule only targeted specific forms of binary predicates,
especially verbal with and adjectival to. The semantic rule in (22) is both less general
and more general than L&P’s transformational rule. On the one hand, symmetric
images are assumed to be derived only for a subset of the collective predicates in

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the lexicon, and are not necessarily related to prepositions like with and to. This

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explains why predicates like collide with or be in love with are not symmetric, and
do not stand in a plain alternation with their collective counterparts. In Section 3
we treat such constructions using a different reciprocity principle than the rule in
(22).15 Further, because the semantic strategy in (22) is lexical, it applies to binary
predicates without with or to. This includes transitive verbs like date and match
and relational nouns like cousin of and sister of. As will be proposed in Section
4, the semantics of reciprocal alternations is regulated by lexical features in the
representation of protopredicates, and is not fully specified by overt items like the
prepositions with and to.

2.5 The linguistic irreducibility of plain reciprocals

By taking collective predicates to be primitive, the semantic strategy above is in line

with theories of plurality where predication over collections has an equal status to
other kinds of predication. One advantage of this view comes from examples like
the following (Lasersohn 1995: p.29):
(23) John, Mary and Bill are similar.
Lasersohn points out a remark by Goodman (1951), showing that the collective
sentence (23) is not equivalent to the following conjunction of transitive sentences:
(24) John is similar to Mary, Mary is similar to Bill, and Bill is similar to John.
Sentence (23) strongly favors situations where John, Mary and Bill share the same
feature (or features). By contrast, sentence (24) is also true if the members of each of
the three pairs share different features. For instance, consider a situation where John
and Mary have the same hobbies, Mary and Bill have the same cultural background,
and Bill and John have the same look. Such a situation supports (24) but not (23). We
conclude that sentence (23) involves a collective predication over the sum j+m+b,
with the predicate similar having the meaning of sharing a feature.16
This “sharing” is a rather general phenomenon with collective predicates. For
example, the collective sentences in (25a) below require that A, B and C share
15 Lakoff & Peters also treat sentences like John left with Bill as derived from John and Bill left together.
This captures the intuition that when comitative with combines with distributive predicates like
leave, its analysis involves collectivity. One complication in L&P’s analysis is that it incorrectly
predicts sentences like Sue jogged with her baby (e.g. using a jogging stroller) to mean “Sue and her
baby jogged together”. For relevant discussion, see Lasersohn 1990, Mari 2003. Further research of
comitative with in relation to the semantics of reciprocal alternations is left for future work.
16 Theories of plurals that rely on pragmatic covers allow readings of sentences like (23) that are
equivalent to (24) (Schwarzschild 1996). These theories have a problem with observations like the
ones above (see also Winter 2000).

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one opinion, one pair of grandparents, and one (material or non-material) asset,
respectively. In contrast, the sentences in (25b) allow different opinions, grandparents
and assets to be associated with each of the three pairs.
(25) a. A, B and C agreed/are cousins/are partners.
b. A agreed with/is cousin of/is partner of B, and
B agreed with/is cousin of/is partner of C, and
C agreed with/is cousin of/is partner of A.
We see that the collective predicates similar, agree, cousin and partner make
stronger claims than pairwise applications of their binary forms. Such collective
predicates support the following “sharing” implications, which are not easily re-
spected if we try to express collective statements using binary predicates:17

be similar → “share feature(s)”

agree → “share opinion(s)”
be cousins → “share grandparent(s)”
be partners → “share asset(s)”

This is evidence that meanings of collective predicates are basic, and cannot be
logically analyzed in terms of simpler meanings.

2.6 The RSG as a language universal

As we have seen, the symmetry of binary predicates in plain alternations is naturally

explained when their meanings are logically derived from their collective alter-
nates. However, some symmetric predicates in English do not have such alternates.
Consider for instance the following examples:
⎧
⎪ resembles ⎫ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ borders on ⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
(26) A ⎨ ⎬B
⎪
⎪
⎪ is near ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ is far from ⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎩ ⎪
⎭
17 Formally, suppose that P is a collective predicate s.t. for any sum A: P(A) ⇔ ∃u.share(A,u). Let the
binary predicate R be defined for all x and y by: R(x,y) ⇔ P(x+y). The statements R(a,b) ∧ R(b,c) ∧
R(c,a) and P(x+y+z) are equivalent to (i) and (ii), respectively:
(i) ∃u1 .share(a+b,u1 ) ∧ ∃u2 .share(b+c,u2 ) ∧ ∃u3 .share(a+c,u3 )
(ii) ∃u.share(a+b+c,u)
Unless we make implausible assumptions on the predicate share, (i) does not entail (ii). Consequently,
it is hard to rely on (i) when analyzing the meaning of (ii).

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⎧
⎪ #resemble ⎫ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ #border ⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
(27) A and B ⎨ ⎬
⎪
⎪
⎪ are near ⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎩ are far ⎪
⎪
⎭
The binary predicates in (26) are symmetric, but their unary usages in (27) cannot be
interpreted reciprocally, if they are interpretable at all. For instance, A&B are near
does not mean that A and B are near each other, and A&B resemble is furthermore
unacceptable. Thus, these unary predicates have no reciprocal sense.18 The RSG
in (18) deals with pairs of predicates where one predicate (“P”) has a reciprocal
interpretation. Therefore, strictly speaking, predicates as in (26) do not challenge our
statement of the RSG. However, the examples in (26) raise an important question:
why does English have only a small class of symmetric predicates without reciprocal
alternates?
As a possible answer to this question, I hypothesize that in fact, all denotations
of symmetric predicates are derived from collective meanings, even when those
meanings are not lexically realized. Specifically, binary predicates like resemble, far
from and near are symmetric due to underlying unary-collective meanings that are
not realized in English as intransitive predicates, but are nevertheless operational at
the semantic analysis. For instance, to deduce the symmetry of the verb resemble, an
English speaker has to have a collective predicate meaning that categorizes a group
of objects as being similar. A transitive sentence like A resembles B is understood
as applying this collective predicate to the sum A+B despite the absence of an
intransitive entry for resemble.
This line of analysis entails that even though English does not have collective
usages for symmetric predicates like resemble and near, other languages might.
To substantiate this “universalist” approach to the RSG, we should examine the
following conjecture:
(28) The Symmetry-Collectivity Conjecture: If a language L1 has a symmetric
binary predicate R without any collective alternate, then there exists another
language, L2 , where the near translation of R does have a collective alternate,
with a plain reciprocal meaning.
18 Like near, the adjective close rejects reciprocity in its spatial use, but close has an additional sense of
social proximity (a close friend), where it does have a reciprocal counterpart (we have been close
since childhood). Other symmetric relations in English that do not have reciprocal counterparts are
remote of and within reach of (Ginzburg 1990).

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To test this conjecture with the English predicates in (26), let us look at some of their
near translations in other languages. First, let us consider the following usages of the
near translations of far, resemble and border on in Greek:19

(29) a. i Thessaloniki apexi apo tin Athina

the Thessaloniki-nom.sg. be-far-pres.3.sg. from the Athens-acc.sg.
“Thessaloniki is far from Athens”
b. i Thessaloniki ke i Athina apexun
the Thessaloniki-nom.sg. and the Athens-acc.sg. be-far-pres.3.pl.
(poli/arketa)
(somewhat/very)
“Thessaloniki and Athens are (somewhat/very) far from each other”
(30) a. o Janis mjazi ston Kosta
the Janis-nom.sg. resemble-pres.3.sg. to.the-acc.sg. Kostas-acc.sg.
“Janis resembles Kostas”
b. o Janis ke o Kostas miázun
the Janis-nom.sg. and the Kostas-nom.sg. resemble-pres.3.pl.
“Janis and Kostas are similar/look alike”
(31) a. i Rosia sinorevi me i Kina
the Russia border-sg. with the China
“Russia has a border in common with China”
b. i Rosia kje i Kina sinorevun
the Russia and the China border-pl.
“Russia and China have a border in common”

Sentences (29b), (30b) and (31b) all have reciprocal meanings. A similar collective-
reciprocal reading appears in (32b) with the parallel of near in Hebrew:
(32) a. nekuda 1 krova le-nekuda 2
point 1 near-fem. to-point 2
“Point 1 is near Point 2”
b. nekudot 1 ve-2 krovot
points 1 and-2 near-fem.pl.
“Points 1 and 2 are near each other”
19 In (29b), the adverbials poli/arketa ‘somewhat/very’ may help to boost the reciprocal interpretation,
but apparently they are not obligatory. I thank Eleni Tsouloucha for pointing out to me (29) and (30).
Example (31) is from Dimitriadis 2004.

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Such data may be used for supporting the conjecture in (28). Any substantial

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attempt to test this conjecture would require comparing many reciprocal and sym-
metric predicates in different languages. At present, despite the extensive typological
knowledge on reciprocals that has accumulated over the last 20 years (Frajzyngier &
Walker 2000, Nedjalkov 2007, König & Gast 2008, Evans et al. 2011), there is no
cross-linguistic database that could help to test such cross-linguistic conjectures as
in (28). This challenge must be left for further research.

3 Preferential reciprocity and non-symmetric predicates

In the previous section we treated symmetric predicates and their plain reciprocal
alternations. This section studies the semantics of verbs like hug, fight and col-
lide, whose binary uses are non-symmetric and fail to show plain reciprocity. This
supports the RSG of Section 2 but raises further questions about the semantics of
reciprocal alternations. After reviewing some central semantic phenomena with
non-plain reciprocals, this section proposes that such alternations are based on a
polysemy relation that lacks a complete logical definition. We characterize two
semantic postulates that restrict the meanings of non-plain reciprocals like the verb
hug: (i) a verbal postulate — if A and B hug then A hugs B or vice versa; (ii) a
nominal postulate — a hug between A and B is either unidirectional or collective.
The latter postulate explains the special properties of reciprocal events (Carlson
1998). Following Kruitwagen et al. 2017, we propose that further specifications
of the semantics of non-plain alternations rely on “soft”, preferential connections,
rather than logical rules. One of these preferences explains the “maximal reciprocity”
inference that speakers often draw when interpreting non-plain reciprocals.

3.1 Non-symmetry and reciprocal alternations

As we have seen, the verb hug shows a reciprocal alternation but fails to show
symmetry. Similar phenomena were observed by Dong (1971), who mentions the
following non-equivalences:
(33) The drunk embraced the lamppost
⇔/ #The lamppost embraced the drunk
The truck collided with the lamppost
⇔/ #The lamppost collided with the truck
Examples as in (33) support the classification of transitive embrace and collide
with as non-symmetric relations. At the same time, in sentences like Dan and Sue
embraced or the two cars collided, the same verbs exhibit a reciprocal interpretation.
Some more English predicates of this type are given in Table 2.

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Transitive/intransitive alternations: hug, embrace, kiss, fuck, fight, divorce

With/intransitive alternations: break up, collide, fall/be in love
To/intransitive alternations: talk, speak, chat, make love
Table 2 Reciprocal alternations with non-symmetric binary predicates

The non-symmetry of embrace and collide is easily observed in (33) due to the
different selectional restrictions of the two arguments. As a result, an assertion of
the form R(x,y) can be true while R(y,x) is unacceptable or patently false. We find
similar non-symmetries with other verbs that have collective intransitive entries:20
(34) Sue kissed the doll ⇔
/ #The doll kissed Sue
Dan fought the fire ⇔
/ #The fire fought Dan
Ann fell in love with the book ⇔
/ #The book fell in love with Ann
Pete talked to the wind ⇔
/ #The wind talked to Pete
The non-symmetry of the verbs in Table 2 also surfaces when the two arguments
of the binary form satisfy the selectional restrictions of both positions. For instance:
(35) a. Sue embraced Dan ⇔ / Dan embraced Sue
b. The truck collided with the bicycle ⇔
/ The bicycle collided with the truck
In (35a) Sue may have embraced Dan without Dan reciprocating. Similarly, in (35b)
the truck may have been the cause of the collision while the bicycle was not. In such
cases, the first sentence in each pair is true while the second sentence is acceptable
but false. Similar effects can be observed with other predicates from Table 2:
(36) a. The chihuahua dog fought the postman (but the postman ignored it).
b. Sue broke up with/divorced Dan (though Dan wished they would stay
together).
c. Dan fell in love with the actress (but she wasn’t interested in him).
d. Ann talked to the clerk (but the clerk didn’t answer).
These examples and similar ones decisively demonstrate that the binary guises of
the predicates in Table 2 are not truth-conditionally symmetric.

3.2 The logical irreducibility of non-plain reciprocals

The non-symmetry of the predicates in Table 2 leads the RSG to expect that these
predicates do not support plain alternations. With respect to the verb hug, we have
already seen that in relation to the following sentence:
20 For similar examples see also Rákosi 2008 on Hungarian and Bar-Asher Siegal 2015 on Hebrew.

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(37) Sue and Dan hugged.

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As we saw, the truth-conditions of sentence (37) are different than those of the
following conjunction:
(38) Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged Sue.
This was exemplified in the following scenario:
(39) Sue hugged Dan while he was sleeping; then, Dan woke up, Sue fell asleep,
and he hugged her while she was sleeping.
Under scenario (39), sentence (38) is true but (37) does not follow. We concluded
that sentence (38) does not logically entail (37), hence the hug alternation is not
plain. Using similar tests, we will show below that the alternations with the other
verbs in Table 2 are not plain either.
This absence of plain reciprocity has been previously observed in Carlson 1998,
Siloni 2002, 2012, Dimitriadis 2008 and Rubinstein 2009, among others.21 These
works all use event semantics, where sentence (37) is analyzed according to the
following formula, in a Davidsonian setup:22
(40) ∃e.hug1 (e,s+d)
In words: there is an event e where the collective predicate hug holds of the sum
s+d. Dimitriadis (2008) further analyzes statements like (40) by decomposing the
event e into sub-events with unidirectional hugs between singular entities. In this
approach, the collective predicate hug1 in (40) is analyzed using the denotation hug2
of transitive hug:
(41) ∃e.∃e1 * e.∃e2 * e.hug2 (e1 ,s,d) ∧ hug2 (e2 ,d,s)
In words: an event e is a collective hug of Sue and Dan if e contains a more
specified event e1 where Sue hugged Dan, and a more specified event e2 where
Dan hugged Sue. This analysis intuitively explains why there is no entailment from
(38) to (37): sentence (38) requires two events e1 and e2 with the corresponding
21 These works do not distinguish intransitive verbs like hug or fight from plain reciprocals like date
or marry, and the symmetry of the latter is not their main concern. The focus in these works is on
non-entailments like the following:
(i) Sue and Dan kissed each other five times ⇒
/ Sue and Dan kissed five times.
(ii) Sue and Dan said that they kissed each other ⇒
/ Sue and Dan said that they kissed.
A full semantic analysis of cases like (i) and (ii) requires a detailed theory of each other, time
adverbials (i), and propositional attitudes (ii), and is beyond the scope of this paper. However, our
main conclusions here are fully consistent with previous analyses of cases like (i) and (ii).
22 The works mentioned above all rely on a neo-Davidsonian setting, but their analyses are very similar
to the Davidsonian presentation in (40) and (41).

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(a) (b)
Figure 1 Kruitwagen et al.’s experiment — in (a), 48% of the participants judged
the Dutch translation of “the girl and the woman hug” as true and “the
woman hugs the girl” as false; in (b), 96% of the participants judged
the Dutch translation of “the car and the truck collide” as true and “the
car collides against the truck” as false.

unidirectional hugs, but such events are not necessarily more specified than any
event e. This leaves room for models where (38) is true but (37) is false.23 More
generally, Dimitriadis proposes a rule that connects any reciprocal entry P to its
binary alternate R. According to this rule, for all events e and entities x and y such
that x =/ y, we have:
(42) P(e,x+y) ⇔ ∃e1 * e.∃e2 * e.R(e1 ,x,y) ∧ R(e2 ,y,x)
Dimitriadis’s account relies on the event-specification relation ‘*’, whose se-
mantics is not formally defined. Thus, his proposal gives no formal criterion for
deciding which pairs e1 and e2 of “unidirectional events” support a collective event
e and which ones do not. This leads to some empirical weaknesses. For instance,
although speakers reject scenarios like (39) as supporting a collective hug, Dim-
itriadis’s analysis does not: it does not rule out the possibility that in models that
support (39), the two “unidirectional” hug events are more specified than some event
e, describing a “collective” hug. Therefore, although rule (42) correctly predicts
that (39) does not entail the sentence Sue and Dan hugged, it does not expect any
inconsistency between the two.
23 (41) uses the “*” symbol for what Dimitriadis, following Link 1987, calls the specification relation
between events. The gist of Dimitriadis’s account of the non-entailment (38)⇒(37)
/ is the assumption
that the domain of events is not necessarily complete under specification: for some domains ε
of events, we have e1 ,e2 ∈ ε but no e ∈ ε s.t. e1 * e and e2 * e. Rubinstein (2009) similarly avoids
completeness in the algebra of events, but she treats reciprocals using “group” events.

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This unintuitive result may seem disappointing if we expect a logical definition

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for the meaning of intransitive hug in terms of transitive hug. However, I believe that
the indeterminacy in Dimitriadis’s analysis is actually welcome: lexical concepts like
collective hug are notoriously vague. As with other concepts, specifying sufficient
and necessary conditions for categorization of events using such lexical concepts is
often hard, or even impossible (Laurence & Margolis 1999). Dimitriadis’s account
and similar proposals give a clear explanation of why sentences like (38) do not
entail collective sentences like (37). Such formal semantic proposals do not aim
to explain which of the situations that support (38) support (37) as well. I believe
that this is as it should be: analyzing lexical concepts like collective hug requires
different principles than standard logical techniques of formal semantics.
Yet, in another respect all previous accounts of non-plain reciprocals are logically
pregnant. The analysis in (42) expects all sentences like (37) to entail conjunctions
like (38). Similarly, virtually all other previous works assume entailments like the
following as a core property of reciprocal alternations:24
(43) Assumption of previous approaches:
A and B hugged (collided/fought) ⇒
A hugged (collided with/fought) B, and B hugged (collided with/fought) A.
Recent experimental results in Kruitwagen et al. 2017 cast doubt on this assumption.
Kruitwagen et al. show that speakers often judge sentences like the antecedent in
(43) as true in situations where they consider one of the conjuncts in the consequent
to be false. For example, in the situation of Figure 1a, 48% of the participants in
Kruitwagen et al.’s experiment judged the Dutch translation of “the girl and the
woman are hugging” as true, while judging “the woman is hugging the girl” as
false. Similar “asymmetric” illustrations and video clips were used by Kruitwagen
et al. to study Dutch verbs of physical contact like botsen “collide” (Figure 1b),
knuffelen “hug”, and vechten “fight”, as well as verbs of communication like praten
“talk”, roddelen “gossip”, and appen “send WhatsApp messages”. In all those cases,
substantial percentages of speakers accepted the collective statement but rejected
one of the corresponding binary statements. The conclusion is that rules like (42),
although partly underspecified, are still too strong as a general description of non-
plain reciprocals. We will get back to this problem in section 3.4.
24 The only potential exception I know is Dowty (1991: n.29), who expresses doubts that “rule-based
approaches” could answer the “deeper question” about acquisition of reciprocal verb meanings.
Dowty mentions the fact that collective predicates normally do not require full participation in an
event (wit. the Americans elected Trump). However, like other previous works, Dowty assumes that
reciprocal predicates as in A and B hugged/kissed are special among the collective predicates, and do
require “full participation” of A and B.

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3.3 Non-plain reciprocals: a variety of lexical relations

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The discussion above concentrated on the verb hug as one example for non-plain
reciprocity. To get an impression of the semantic diversity of non-plain reciprocals,
this section considers some more examples for such verbs. As for the verb hug,
we saw that we cannot infer a collective hug from two unidirectional hugs, and
conversely: events with a single unidirectional hug may be classified as collective
hugs. In general notation, neither (Pr1 ) nor (Pr2 ) below holds for hug, where R is the
binary entry and P is the corresponding reciprocal verb:
(Pr1 ) [R(x,y) ∧ R(y,x)] ⇒ P(x+y)
(Pr2 ) P(x+y) ⇒ R(x,y)
The non-entailment (37)⇒(38)
/ demonstrated the lack of property (Pr1 ). The non-
entailment (38)⇒(37)
/ in Kruitwagen et al.’s experiments demonstrated the lack of
(Pr2 ).
A weaker logical property than (Pr1 ) may still hold for hug. Suppose that Sue
hugged Dan and that Dan hugged Sue at the same time. In such a case is very hard to
imagine how Sue and Dan could not have hugged. Thus, we may reasonably accept
the following entailment:
(44) Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged Sue simultaneously
⇒ Sue and Dan hugged
In more general terms, with Sim as an informal notation for the simultaneity require-
ment, we denote:
(Pr3 ) [R(x,y) ∧ R(y,x) ∧ Sim] ⇒ P(x+y)
Examining the inferential properties (Pr1 )-(Pr3 ) has shown us in which ways the
lexical meaning of the verb hug fails to show plain reciprocity. Other verbs that show
a similar behavior are embrace and make love to, as well as the verb fuck and its
variants (Dong 1971). We now move on to other examples of non-plain reciprocals
and their inferential properties.

kiss: This is another non-symmetric predicate whose alternation is similar to hug,

though counterexamples for (Pr2 ) are not easily found. If Sue and Dan are
kissing, it is hard to imagine how Dan could not be kissing Sue. Presumably,
however, this difference is smaller than it seems: if Dan is extremely cooperative
while Sue is kissing him, without kissing her back, I speculate that speakers
might accept the collective scenario as they did for hug in Kruitwagen et al.’s
experiments. Showing this point experimentally would require a more specific
study of this verb.

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 Symmetric predicates and reciprocal alternations

fight: Transitive fight is a non-symmetric predicate, which alternates with collec-

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tive fight similarly to the hug alternation:25 like hug, the verb fight satisfies
(Pr3 ) but does not satisfy (Pr1 ). Kruitwagen et al. show that a parallel verb in
Dutch — vechten (tegen), ‘fight (against)’ — does not satisfy (Pr2 ) either.
break up, divorce: Examples like (36b) above show that the predicate break up
with is not symmetric. Expectedly, the break up (with) alternation is not plain.
For instance, the following example shows that break up fails to show property
(Pr2 ):
(45) Sue and Dan broke up ⇒
/ Sue broke up with Dan
If the instigator of the breakup was Dan, then the antecedent in (45) is true
but the consequent may be false (e.g. if the breakup was against Sue’s will).
Interestingly, however, the break up alternation shows the following property:
(46) Sue broke up with Dan ⇒ Sue and Dan broke up
In general notation:
(Pr4 ) R(x,y) ⇒ P(x+y)
Property (Pr4 ) is logically stronger than (Pr1 ), hence predicates like break up
trivially satisfy (Pr1 ) as well. For instance, if Sue broke up with Dan and Dan
broke up with Sue, then Sue and Dan broke up: once (if both Dan and Sue were
the instigators of one breakup), or twice (with a different instigator reported for
each breakup).
A similar behavior is observed with the non-symmetric predicate divorce. If Sue
and Dan divorced, the sentence Sue divorced Dan may still be false (failure of
(Pr2 )), but if one of the two people divorced the other, it necessarily follows that
they divorced (Pr4 ).
collide: As we saw, collide with is a non-symmetric predicate. As Kruitwagen et
al. show, the Dutch parallel of collide — botsen (tegen), ‘collide (against)’ —
fails to show (Pr2 ). Further, the alternation between collective collide and collide
with fails to show property (Pr4 ): if Sue’s car collided with a bridge, it does not
follow that #Sue’s car and the bridge collided. Whether (Pr1 ) holds with collide
is hard to test, since the test would have to involve unlikely situations like car
1 colliding with car 2 and car 2 colliding with car 1 in different occasions. By
contrast, (Pr3 ) surely holds: if two cars simultaneously collided with each other,
then they undoubtedly collided.
25 Unlike hug, the English verb fight also has a comitative use (e.g. Sue fought with Dan, see Section
4.3) as well as an intransitive use with an implicit object reading (e.g. Sue fought hard).

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in love: The predicate be in love with is not symmetric. However, if A and B are in
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love, then A is in love with B and B is in love with A. Thus, the in love alternation
satisfies property (Pr2 ). On the other hand, if A is in love with B and B is in love
with A, neither of them has to be aware of the other’s feelings, or even know
that the other one knows her. In this situation, the love relations between the two
people are not accompanied by “collective intentionality” (a term due to Searle
1990). Accordingly, the situation misses a critical ingredient of the collective
interpretation of A&B are in love. In such a situation, this sentence can only be
considered true under a distributive reading: “A is in love (with someone) and
B is in love (with someone)”. According to this observation, the construction
be in love, and its eventive variant fall in love, fail to show (Pr1 ) and hence
are non-plain reciprocals. Note that these constructions do not even satisfy the
weaker property (Pr3 ): even if each of A and B is in love or falls in love with
the other at the same time, the sentence A&B are (fell) in love may remain false
under its collective reading.
talk: Similar observations hold for the talk (to) alternation. If A is talking to B and
B is talking to A, the collective interpretation of sentence A&B are talking may
be false. This collective interpretation requires that A and B are intentionally
engaged in a talk. However, if the two people do not hear each other or are
not listening to each other, the collective interpretation of sentence A&B are
talking may be considered false. Since the collective reading of intransitive talk
and the binary form talk to do not satisfy property (Pr3 ), they are not in a plain
alternation.26 Furthermore, Kruitwagen et al. experimentally show that in Dutch,
a parallel alternation — praten (tegen), ‘talk (against, to)’ — does not satisfy
(Pr2 ) either: if one person is talking to the other while the other person is quiet
but looks collaborative, many speakers accept collective sentences like “the two
people are talking”.
Hebrew makir (‘know’): Another example for a non-plain alternation is the He-
brew verb makir (“knows”, “is familiar with”, “has heard of”). Like its English
translations, the transitive use of this verb is non-symmetric. Now let us consider
the following sentence:
(47) morrissey makir et hod-ma’alata, ve-hi makira
Morrissey know-masc.sg. ACC her-majesty and-she know-fem.sg.
oto
him
26 Like the reciprocal fight, the verb talk also allows a comitative with, which plausibly supports a plain
alternation. A similar but subtler distinction between the comitative and the transitive entry is found
between transitive meet and meet with: witness the contrast in A met (with) B at the station (Dixon
2005: 361-2).

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“Morrissey knows Her Majesty, and she knows him”

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Sentence (47) is most probably true of the two celebrities, at least when makir is
interpreted in the sense of “has heard of”.27 However, this does not yet support
the truth of the following sentence:

(48) morrissey ve-hod-ma’alata makirim

Morrissey and-her-majesty know-masc.pl.
“Morrissey and Her Majesty are acquainted with each other”

Sentence (48) entails a personal acquaintance between Morrissey and Her

Majesty, whereas (47) does not: if Morrissey and the queen have never met
or talked, (48) is false while (47) is still likely to be true. Note that unlike what
we saw with the English predicates be in love and talk, the intransitive use of
makir in (48) only has a collective interpretation and no distributive interpreta-
tion. This intransitive form does not tolerate singular subjects (wit. *morrissey
makir “Morrissey knows”). Therefore, the intransitive sentence (48) is unam-
biguously collective, and only has the sense “be in an acquaintance relation with
each other”.

The facts reviewed above are summarized in Table 3. As we see, there are
different ways in which non-symmetric predicates fail to show the plain reciprocity
equivalence in (7). Yet, one weak logical pattern is shared by all the predicates in
Table 3. For all entities x and y such that x =/ y, we have:
(Pr5 ) P(x+y) ⇒ R(x,y) ∨ R(y,x)
Thus, when two people hug, fight, collide, or break up, then at least one of them must
be hugging/fighting/etc. the other. This weak disjunctive entailment is found with
all non-plain reciprocals (and of course, with all plain reciprocals). Yet, property
(Pr5 ) gives little insight into the general semantics of non-plain alternations. As
Table 3 summarizes, other logical properties are often found in such alternations.
Property (Pr5 ) is only a necessary requirement from reciprocal predicates, but the
intuitive notion of “reciprocity” is often much stronger. In fact, the only reciprocal
predicates I know where the entailment (Pr5 ) may reasonably be strengthened into
an equivalence are break up and divorce. Is there something more general than (Pr5 )
that can be said about non-plain alternations? The following two sections answer
this question positively, from two different perspectives: the counting properties of
event nominals, and the preferential properties of reciprocal concepts.
27 Morrissey used this sense of know in a song from 1986: “So I broke into the Palace/With a sponge
and a rusty spanner/She said: ‘Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing’/I said: ‘that’s nothing — you
should hear me play piano’” (The Smiths, The Queen is Dead).

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hug kiss fight break up divorce collide be/fall talk makir

in love (Hebrew
‘know’)
in/tr in/tr in/tr in/w in/tr in/w in/w in/to in/tr
Pr1 – – – + + ? – – –
Pr2 – ? – – – – + – +
Pr3 + + + + + + – – –
Pr4 – – – + + – – – –
Pr5 + + + + + + + + +
in/tr: intransitive/transitive alternation Pr1 : [R(x,y) ∧ R(y,x)] ⇒ P(x+y)
in/w: intransitive/with alternation Pr2 : P(x+y) ⇒ R(x,y)
in/to: intransitive/to alternation Pr3 : [R(x,y) ∧ R(y,x) ∧ Sim] ⇒ P(x+y)
Pr4 : R(x,y) ⇒ P(x+y)
Pr5 : P(x+y) ⇒ [R(x,y) ∨ R(y,x)]

Table 3 Logical patterns with non-plain reciprocals

3.4 On counting events

Following Carlson 1998 and Siloni 2002, previous works have addressed some
questions about the way events are counted with reciprocal predicates (see note 21).
Here we focus on one of these questions, which Carlson calls the individuation of
events. If Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged Sue, how many hug events were there?
Answering “two” would be too hasty, since the given conjunction may also be true
when the two acts are considered parts of one collective hug event. In that case we
might as well answer “one hug”. It is impossible to decide a priori that one of these
two counting strategies is the “correct” one. Thus, the following entailment fails:
(49) Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged Sue ⇒
/ There were two hugs.
This failure is due to the ambiguity (or polysemy) of the noun hug: like the corre-
sponding verb, this noun describes unidirectional as well as bidirectional events.
After observing this ambiguity of reciprocal event nominals, it is also useful
to observe their disambiguation strategies. Suppose that Sue hugged Dan and Dan
hugged Sue, and we choose to count it as one hug. Under this reading of the noun
hug, we intuitively assume that the sentence Sue and Dan hugged is true. Formally,
this intuition is described as the following entailment:
(50) Sue hugged Dan and Dan hugged Sue, and there was only one hug between
Sue and Dan ⇒ Sue and Dan hugged.

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These observations extend to the other eventive verbs in Table 3: if Sue fought,

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kissed or collided with Dan, and Dan did the same to Sue, we may count it as
one collective fight, kiss or collision, or as two unidirectional events. Additionally,
if in such a case we only count one event, then this event is a collective event,
which supports the sentences Sue and Dan fought (kissed, collided).28 Note that
(non-)entailments similar to (49) and (50) also trivially hold with plain reciprocals
like marry:
(51) Sue married Dan and Dan married Sue ⇒
/ There were two marriages.
(52) Sue married Dan and Dan married Sue, and there was only one marriage
between Sue and Dan ⇒ Sue and Dan married.
To account for these counting effects, we adopt one direction of Dimitriadis’s
proposal in (42):
(53) ∃e1 * e.∃e2 * e.R(e1 ,x,y) ∧ R(e2 ,y,x) ⇒ P(e,x+y)
Thus, when two unidirectional R events (e1 and e2 ) are considered part of an event
e, then that event is a collective P event. In such cases, Dimitriadis (2008) stipulates
that “events specifying some superior eventuality are obscured by it; when we count
events, we only count eventualities that [ . . . ] do not themselves specify some ‘larger’
eventuality”. This means that in cases where the antecedent of (53) holds for an
event e, we only count one event: a mutual hug, fight etc. Consequently, we account
for the non-entailment (49) as follows: if the hugs in the antecedent are viewed as
two parts of another event, then we only count that event as a hug event. That event
also supports the entailment in (50).29
By contrast to these counting effects with reciprocals, transitive verbs without
reciprocal alternates individuate single events. For instance, in contrast to (49), the
parallel entailment below does hold with the verb push and the corresponding noun:
(54) Sue pushed Dan and Dan pushed Sue ⇒ There were two pushes.
28 The same also holds for stative expressions like be in love or Hebrew makir (“know”). If Dan is in
love with Sue and Sue is in love with Dan, we may count it as one state of love or as two states. If we
count only one state, then the sentence Sue and Dan are in love is true under the collective reading.
29 A formal system of event “specification” should derive these results without stipulations like Dimitri-
adis’s. The challenge is similar to other cases of counting of events and individuals (Krifka 1990,
Rothstein 2010, 2017). For instance, Rothstein points out a contrast between count nouns like cat
and count nouns like fence: while cats are “naturally countable”, fences are not. Thus, for any two
separate entities A and B:
(i) A is a cat and B is a cat ⇒ A and B together are two cats.
(ii) A is a fence and B is a fence ⇒
/ A and B together are two fences (A and B may be different
parts of one fence).
This contrast is remarkably similar to the contrast between hug and push events in (49) vs. (54).

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Even if the antecedent in (54) is true because Sue and Dan pushed each other si-
multaneously, we must count two pushes and not one “mutual push”. We conclude
that the unambiguous transitivity of the verb push correlates with the unambiguous
directionality of the event nominal push. According to Dimitriadis’s line, the en-
tailment (54) is accounted for by assuming that for any two push events e1 and e2 ,
the antecedent of (53) fails for any possible event e: there is no way of having two
push events that specify a larger event. Thus, the contrast between (53) and (49) is
a candidate for a semantic property distinguishing possibly reciprocal verbs from
other verbs. Informally, we state this distinction as follows:
(55) Event individuation with (non-)reciprocal verbs:
• Binary verbs that have a reciprocal alternate (e.g. hug, marry) do not
individuate events described by the corresponding event nominal.
• Binary verbs that do not have a reciprocal alternate (e.g. push) individu-
ate events described by the event nominal.
This property characterizes binary verbs that have a reciprocal alternate on the basis
of their semantic relation with the corresponding event nominal. Events described
by these verbs do not stand in a one-to-one correspondence with the events that the
nominal individuates. By contrast, the events specified by transitive verbs like push
specify events in a one-to-one relation to the corresponding nominal. As a result,
any use of such a verb is counted as one event. This property, like property (Pr5 )
above, is a logical regularity that distinguishes reciprocal verbs from other verbs.

3.5 Preferential reciprocity

The semantic properties that we have considered so far do not define completely how
a non-plain reciprocal verb is logically related to its binary counterpart. No matter
how hard we try, it seems impossible to specify necessary and sufficient conditions
that fully define the semantics of non-plain alternations. This kind of difficulty is
quite common in lexical semantics (Laurence & Margolis 1999). A familiar reaction
to this challenge has been to replace logical analyses of concepts by theories based on
typicality. In such theories, key features in a concept’s representation determine how
typical different entities are considered as instances of that concept. For example,
most speakers consider tennis as a more typical instance of the concept sport than
chess. This judgement is based on certain key features of the concept sport that
characterize tennis, but not chess: physical activity, played outdoors, carried out in
stadiums etc. Such features are assumed to be part of the concept representation for
sport. This does not define the concept yet, but it explains the preference of tennis to

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chess as a sport, while still leaving room for speakers to consider chess as a sport

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(e.g. due to its competitive nature).
What is common to many typicality-based accounts is their specification of
predicate extensions using what Hampton (2007) calls the threshold model of cat-
egorization. For example, suppose that sport is the lexical predicate associated
with the concept sport. When determining the truth-value of a statement sport(x),
speakers rely on the typicality value for x in relation to sport, and check if it is above
their threshold value. The way this typicality value is determined depends on the
most salient features of the concept. In this approach, the important challenge is not
so much to define the “real” truth-conditions of sentences like X is a sport, fruit,
pet etc., but to recognize speakers’ strategies of using typical features of concepts
when making truth-value judgements on such sentences. The features of concepts
like sport do not change dramatically from one speaker to another, but the factors
that determine their use, including the categorization threshold, vary from speaker
to speaker and from situation to situation. When speakers try to categorize chess
as an instance of sport, the partial matching between the features of chess and the
features of the concept sport leads to a boundary typicality value. This explains the
divergences in truth-value judgements on contingent sentences like chess is a sport.
I propose that something quite similar is happening with reciprocal verbs like
hug. To analyze the meaning of such lexical items, the challenge is not so much
to determine necessary and sufficient truth-conditions for sentences like A&B are
hugging, but to characterize the systemic variables that affect truth-value judgements
on such sentences. As with other concepts, this can be achieved by characterizing
typical properties of the concept’s instances. I propose that one property that is
common to all collective predicates that partake in reciprocity alternations is what I
call preferential reciprocity. When trying to categorize an event as a collective hug,
we look for as many as possible pairs of agents that perform unidirectional hugs
in that event. In this typicality-based account of hug, we still use the Davidsonian
predicates like hug1 and hug2 as above, which range over entities and events.30
When a reciprocal predicate hug1 applies to an event e and a sum A, we rely on the
typicality value of e and A for the concept “collective hug”. This typicality value is
proportional to the number of non-identical pairs ⟨x,y⟩ over A, such that x is hugging
y in e. In formula:
(56) Typhug1 (e,A) ∝ ∣{⟨x,y⟩ ∈ A2 ∶ x =/ y ∧ hug2 (e,x,y)}∣
Definition (56) leads us to expect the non-entailments between sentences (37)
and (38). When (38) is true, there is an event e1 where hug2 (e1 ,x,y) holds and
another event e2 where hug2 (e2 ,y,x) holds. This does not mean that we found any
30 Here, the term “event” is meant to also include states, which is useful for stative predicates like be in
love and Hebrew makir, discussed above.

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event e where Typhug1 (e,x+y) passes the speaker’s threshold for collective hug.
Furthermore, (56) also explains why (37) does not entail (38): an event e where
Typhug1 (e,x+y) passes the speaker’s threshold does not guarantee that within e, the
relation hug2 holds in both directions.
The analysis in (56) embodies a weak, non-logical relation between collective
events and directional events: it guarantees that having many unidirectional hugs in
an event boosts its typicality as a collective hug. More formally:
(57) Let e be an event with a set of agents A such that Typhug1 (e,A) passes the
speaker’s threshold. Then any event e′ that contains more hug2 relations than
e but is otherwise minimally different from e, passes the speaker’s threshold
as well.
Thus, changing a unidirectional hug as in Figure 1a to an event where the woman
hugs the girl as well can only boost the categorization of the event as a collective
hug. This prediction is supported by Kruitwagen et al.’s (2017) findings.31
Generalizing the principle in (56), let us consider the Davidsonian meaning P of
a unary-collective predicate, and the Davidsonian meaning R of an alternate binary
predicate. The following condition characterizes P as preferentially reciprocal with
respect to R:
(58) Preferential reciprocity: For every event e with a sum argument A, the
typicality value TypP (e,A) of that event with respect to A satisfies:
TypP (e,A) ∝ ∣{⟨x,y⟩ ∈ A2 ∶ x =/ y ∧ R(e,x,y)}∣
This condition explains how reciprocal interpretations surface in the absence of
plain reciprocity. According to (58), preferential reciprocity is a typicality effect
with collective verbs like hug, fight and collide, which relates them to their binary
alternates. This helps to explain two inferential effects:

i. Default inferences: In many situations, speakers infer plain reciprocity as a

default with non-plain reciprocals. For instance, upon hearing the sentence
Sue and Dan hugged, most people would infer that each of them hugged the
other. However, upon being shown weird scenarios like Figure 1a, speakers
often accept the collective sentence despite the absence of a bidirectional
hug. This kind of “defeasible” reasoning characterizes inferences with many
natural concepts. Famously, speakers tend to accept inferences like Tweety
31 Kruitwagen et al. also identify effects that are extraneous to the meaning of transitive hug, but boost
the categorization of an event as a collective hug. One such factor is what they call the collective
intentionality of the group (Searle 1990): the degree to which its members show a joint attention, a
shared belief, or a collective emotion. With respect to the verb hug, for instance, Kruitwagen et al.
show the relevance of this factor by comparing the categorization of Figure 1a to a similar drawing
where the depicted woman has a less collaborative look.

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is a bird, therefore she flies, and only start questioning them after being

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reminded about penguins, ostriches and the like.
ii. Disjunctive inferences: As mentioned above, the disjunctive property (Pr5 )
characterizes all reciprocal verbs. This is easily explained by principle (58).
For a sentence like Sue and Dan hugged to be judged as true, all speakers re-
quire a non-zero typicality threshold. If neither Dan nor Sue hugged the other
person, typicality is zero (or close to zero), and the sentence is unanimously
judged as false in all situations.

Recognizing these predictions from (58), we are justified to refer to collective verbs
like hug as “reciprocal”. However, as we saw, empirically we must distinguish
preferential reciprocity from the logical, plain reciprocity that was addressed in
Section 2. With preferential alternations, I propose that binary predicate meanings
are not logically derived from their reciprocal alternates, or vice versa. This aspect
of the proposal is made explicit in the type system of the next section.

4 The RSG and the formal semantics of protopredicates

The previous two sections analyzed the behavior of reciprocal predicates and in-
troduced the Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization. As we saw, the link that the
RSG makes between plain reciprocity and symmetry is not a logical necessity, but
a contingent fact about language. In theory, we might expect languages with sym-
metric predicates in non-plain alternations, or non-symmetric predicates in plain
alternations. How can we account for the apparent absence of such cases in English
and other languages? Would such an account be plausible as a language universal?
Would it follow from other established properties of natural language?
Answering these general questions requires more knowledge than what is cur-
rently available. In this paper I will only deal with one preliminary issue: the lexical
properties that are necessary for deriving the RSG as a corollary. Thus, the challenge
of this section is to develop a formal account that explicitly describes the semantic
relations between unary predicates and binary predicates in reciprocal alternations
according to the RSG. This is done by defining a notion of protopredicate, which
forms an intermediate level between concepts and lexical predicates. I will de-
velop this notion as a formal semantic correlate of previous accounts — especially
by Dowty and Rappaport-Hovav & Levin — and show how the new mechanism
naturally accounts for the RSG.

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4.1 Dowty’s and Rappaport-Hovav & Levin’s accounts of verb alternations

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In traditional Transformational Grammar and Montague Grammar, the only means

for encoding semantic relations between lexical entries is using syntactic trans-
formations or logical meaning postulates. Indeed, all previous formal analyses of
reciprocal predicates postulate some syntactic or semantic rules that link their mean-
ings to their binary alternates. Dimitriadis’s semantic rule in (42) is representative of
recent approaches to reciprocal alternations. An opposing view to such rule-based
accounts of predicate alternations is introduced by Dowty (1991: pp.584-5), who
does not rely on formal principles connecting between predicate meanings. Instead,
according to Dowty’s account, the realization of a participant in an eventuality as
argument in a certain syntactic position (subject, object etc.) is based on prototypical
roles. A participant that shows prototypical properties of an agent (volition, activity,
movability, etc.) is more likely to appear in subject position than a participant that
has prototypical properties of a patient (affected, stationary, etc.). Although Dowty
does not analyze reciprocal predicates in detail, two of his remarks are especially
illuminating for our purposes:

1. “Marrying, playing chess, debating [ . . . ] are actions that by their nature

require the volitional involvement of two parties. [ . . . ] By the same token,
volition is irrelevant to whether stative relations [like rhyme, intersect, and
be similar] obtain.”
2. [Hugging, kissing, making love etc. are] “actions that differ from both of the
types [mentioned in 1] in that [ . . . ] the relation may involve volition on the
part of either one or of both parties, without the language, as it were, feeling
the need for [ . . . ] ‘unrelated’ lexemes to distinguish such subcases.”

Dowty’s first remark concerns verbs that — in the terminology of Section 2 — show
plain reciprocity. What is common to these verbs is that volition, a prototypical
property of agents, does not distinguish the different participants. More generally:
plain reciprocals like marry or similar only refer to eventualities where different
participants have the same roles. As a result, such plain reciprocals show no differ-
ence in meaning between the unary entry and the binary entry. By contrast, with
non-plain predicates like hug, events may have only one participant that exhibits
volition. This kind of hug is exclusively described by the binary entry, hence the
semantic difference between that entry and the unary use of the verb.
The aim here is to capture the RSG by relying on these intuitive distinctions.
To do that, we define what Rappaport Hovav & Levin (1998) call a “structural
component of meaning”: those aspects of lexical semantics that are responsible for
the relations between meanings of a predicate’s alternates. RH&L’s proposal makes

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use of verb templates: structural descriptions that involve concepts like ACT, CAUSE

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and BECOME, and describe semantic relations between different verbal entries. For
instance, for describing the relations between the intransitive and transitive forms of
the verb break (“the vase broke”, “Sue broke the vase”) RH&L use the following
templates:
(59) Intransitive break: [ BECOME [ x ⟨ BROKEN ⟩ ]]
Transitive break: [[ x ACT] CAUSE [ BECOME [ y ⟨ BROKEN ⟩ ]]]
The predicate symbol “BROKEN” in (59) stands for the abstract concept associated
with the verb break. The templates in (59) are general representations of the meanings
of intransitive break and transitive break in terms of this (unanalyzed) concept.
Generalizing this template, RH&L obtain a meaning representation for all verbs that
participate in this inchoative-causative alternation like the verb break.
Other alternations are treated using different templates. For instance, the alterna-
tion between transitive sweep (“Dan swept the floor”) and resultative sweep (“Dan
swept the floor clean”) is described as follows:
(60) Transitive sweep: [ x ACT ⟨SWEEP⟩ y ]
Resultative sweep: [[ x ACT ⟨SWEEP⟩ y ] CAUSE [ BECOME [ y ⟨ STATE ⟩ ]]]
Importantly, while the template in (60) is used with sweep and other resultatives, it is
ruled out with verbs like break. This is observed in the ungrammaticality of strings
like *Dan broke the dishes valueless.

4.2 Protopredicates

Templates as in (59) and (60) are the “structural components” that Rappaport-Hovav
& Levin use for describing meanings of lexical verbs in terms of abstract predicate
concepts. In more semantic terms, we restate these representational descriptions as
follows:

(i) Each predicate concept is associated with an abstract type, which describes
properties of this concept’s denotations that are constant across models. For
instance: the predicate BROKEN only applies to states with one participant,
whereas SWEEP only applies to events with two participants.
(ii) When a template matches a concept’s type, it derives denotations for the
lexical predicates associated with that concept. For instance: the rules in (59)
derive denotations for the intransitive and transitive entries of the verb break,
based on a type of the concept BROKEN that classifies it as suitable for this
template.

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In this way, a concept’s type and the templates it is associated with encode a class of
lexical predicates: “sets of semantically-related verbs [or other predicates — Y.W.]
sharing a range of linguistic properties, such as possible realizations of arguments,
and interpretation associated with each possible argument realization.” (Levin 2009)
Rappaport-Hovav & Levin’s paper does not deal with reciprocal predicates.
However, their use of templates is consistent with Dowty’s conception. Similarly
to RH&L’s reliance on a distinction between concepts like BROKEN and SWEEP,
the quotes above from Dowty 1991 specify a difference between concepts like
MARRY and concepts like HUG . Information that encodes this distinction must be
available to any linguistic analysis that seeks to model the difference between verbs
like marry and hug. According to Dowty, events that are categorized using the
concept MARRY must have two participants that are not thematically distinguished.
By contrast, participants in events that are categorized by the concept HUG may
be thematically distinguished, in that there may be only one participant showing
volition. To formalize this distinction between the concepts MARRY and HUG, we
analyze MARRY as a collective predicate concept that has unordered sums in its
extension. By contrast, the concept HUG is analyzed using an abstract predicate
that categorizes sums as well as ordered pairs. Concepts like MARRY are assigned
the type c (collective), whereas concepts like HUG are given the type bc (binary-
collective). In other cases, as with the transitive verb push, we have “purely binary”
concepts. Such predicates only have a binary form that distinguishes a participant
showing volition from another participant. Thus, we assume that the concept PUSH
only categorizes events with ordered pairs of participants. Such concepts are assigned
the type b, for binary.
The b, c and bc types describe the aggregation of participants in the eventualities
that a concept categorizes. By doing that, they also restrict the semantic rules, or
templates, that are applicable to a concept. Let us first address the first aspect: the
possible denotations for concepts of different types. When we concentrate on verbs,
these denotations are representable as standard n-ary Davidsonian predicates: rela-
tions between an event or a state and participants in that eventuality.32 Since these
relations are the basis for deriving denotations of lexical predicates, we refer to them
32 While this analysis can be easily extended to nouns and adjectives, there is a reason to focus here
on verbs: (i) apparently, all reciprocal nouns and adjectives in English show plain reciprocity, which
makes them a less general test case; (ii) our account is neutral on the question whether (some) nouns
or adjectives have an event argument (Larson 1998). The first point is quite remarkable, and may be
related to the latter point: presumably, non-plain reciprocity stems from the special role of events in
the semantics of verbs. Interesting as they are, these issues do not bear too much on the analysis here:
treating nouns and adjectives using protopredicates can be similar to the treatment of verbs (if we use
events), or even simpler (if we do not).

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as protopredicates.33 A protopredicate is an abstract description of a predicate mean-

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ing, where the class of the predicate is encoded as the protopredicate’s type. Here
we focus on the protopredicates of the three types discussed above: n-ary relations
of type b, c or bc that range over eventualities and (sums of) other individuals.
To see what kind of relations these protopredicates denote, let us first consider the
c-type protopredicate for the concept MARRY in a model that describes the following
marriages:
(61) Marriage 1: A and B are collectively involved.
Marriage 2: C and D are collectively involved.
This is the only kind of eventualities that the concept of monogamic marriage allows:
ones where two participants are collectively involved. The marriages in (61) are
described by the following sentences:
(62) a. A&B married (alternatively: A married B, or B married A).
b. C&D married (alternatively: C married D, or C married D).
In a model of these two marriages, the protopredicate marryc holds of the sums
corresponding to A&B and C&D as the respective participants of two different
events. Formally:
(63) marryc = {⟨e1 ,a+b⟩,⟨e2 ,c+d⟩}
This protopredicate is responsible for deriving both the intransitive and the transitive
guises of the verb marry. Following Dowty, and ultimately Lakoff & Peters 1969,
we view this as the origin for the symmetry of the latter. The same holds for all
predicates that we classified as plain reciprocals. They are derived from c-type
protopredicates whose denotations hold of sums, hence the binary forms of such
predicates are symmetric.
Protopredicates of non-plain reciprocals like hug are assigned the type bc. Such
protopredicates hold of pairs as well as sums. To see how such protopredicates are
used, let us consider the following hug events:
(64) Hug 1: A is active and B is passive.
Hug 2: B is active and A is passive.
Hug 3: C and D are collectively involved, and both of them are active.
Hug 4: E and F are collectively involved, but only E is active.
33 Dowty used the term “protorole” to describe prototypical properties that participants have in an
eventuality. Protopredicates relate to this notion as follows: let C be a concept that categorizes an
event e with participants x and y; then these participants occupy the same (collective) argument of
the protopredicate associated with C if and only if x and y have the same protorole, i.e. the same
prototypical properties in the eventualities that C categorizes.

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Hugs 1 and 2 are prototypical directional hugs. Hug 3 is a prototypical “collec-
tive hug”: the two participants are collectively engaged, and they are both actively
engaged. Hug 4 is a “collective non-symmetric hug”: the two participants are col-
lectively involved, but only one of them is actively hugging the other one (see e.g.
Figure 1a). These four events support the following sentences, respectively.
(65) a. A hugged B.
b. B hugged A.
c. C&D hugged; C hugged D; D hugged C.
d. E&F hugged; E hugged F.
Thus, in models that describe the events in (64), we construct the protopredicate
hugbc as follows:
Hug 1 corresponds to the ordered pair ⟨a,b⟩.
Hug 2 corresponds to the ordered pair ⟨b,a⟩.
Hug 3 corresponds to the sum c+d and the ordered pairs ⟨c,d⟩ and ⟨d,c⟩.
Hug 4 corresponds to the sum e+ f and the ordered pair ⟨e, f ⟩.
In sum, we get the following denotation for the protopredicate hug:
(66) hugbc = {⟨e1 ,a,b⟩,⟨e2 ,b,a⟩,⟨e3 ,c+d⟩,⟨e3 ,c,d⟩,⟨e3 ,d,c⟩,⟨e4 ,e+ f ⟩,⟨e4 ,e, f ⟩}
In addition to c and bc protopredicates such as marry and hug, we also use
binary protopredicates of type b. For example, (67) and (68) below describe the way
we model different push events using the protopredicate push of type b:
(67) Push 1: A is active and B is passive.
Push 2: B is active and A is passive.
Push 3: C is pushing herself.
(68) pushb = {⟨e1 ,a,b⟩,⟨e2 ,b,a⟩,⟨e3 ,c,c⟩}
The entailment observed in (54) means that unlike Hug 3 above, we do not have
push events with two participants where both participants are active.

4.3 Deriving denotations of lexical predicates from protopredicates

To formalize the three types of protopredicates, we use E as the domain of entities

and ε as the domain of events (possibly a sub-domain of E). The notation E 2
is standardly for the cartesian product E × E: the set of ordered pairs from E. In
addition, we also use the notation ℘2 (E) for the set of all duo sums in E. Formally:34
34 For simplicity, here we only treat c and bc protopredicates ranging over duo sums. Extending this
definition for sums with more than two members is straightforward.

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℘2 (E) = {x+y ∣ x,y ∈ E and x =/ y}.

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We use this notation for generalizing the treatment of protopredicates in (63), (66) and
(68) above. With the protopredicate pushb , the denotation in (68) associates events
with pairs in E 2 , but not with sums. With marryc , the denotation (63) associates
events with sums in ℘2 (E), but not with pairs. With hugbc , the denotation (66)
associates events with sums as well as pairs. These three types of protopredicates
are generally defined as follows:
(69) Protopredicate denotations: Let E and ε be non-empty sets of entities and
events, respectively. The denotation JPK of a protopredicate P over E and
ε is made of two parts: a binary part JPKB and a collective part JPKC . For
protopredicates of types b, c and bc, these parts are:
Pb : JPb KB ⊆ ε × E 2 JPb KC is undefined
Pc : JPc KB is undefined JPc KC ⊆ ε × ℘2 (E)
Pbc : JPbc KB ⊆ ε × E 2 JPbc KC ⊆ ε × ℘2 (E)
From these protopredicates we derive collective and binary lexical predicates as
follow:

• Collective lexical predicates hold of the sums in the C part of protopredicates.

For instance, the intransitive entries for marry and hug denote the following
functions over events e and sums z:
Jmarryiv K = λ e.λ z.⟨e,z⟩ ∈ Jmarryc KC
Jhugiv K = λ e.λ z.⟨e,z⟩ ∈ Jhugc KC
• Binary lexical predicates are derived using two strategies:
(i) One strategy derives binary predicates directly from the ordered pairs
in the B part of protopredicates. For instance, the denotations of the
transitive entries for push and hug are:
Jpushtv K = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x,y⟩ ∈ Jpushb KB
Jhugtv K = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x,y⟩ ∈ Jhugbc KB
(ii) Another strategy uses the rule in (22) to derive binary predicates from
the sums in the C part of protopredicates. For instance, the denotation
of transitive marry is:
Jmarrytv K = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x+y⟩ ∈ Jmarryc KC

The last example above illustrates how a plain alternation is derived from the
c-type protopredicate marry. With the bc-type protopredicate hug, English does
not support such a plain strategy. However, other languages also have a comitative

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meaning “hug with”, in addition to transitive hug. English has similar cases. For
instance, collective fight alternates both with transitive fight and with the binary
construction fight with. Other examples where the same collective verb shows two
reciprocal alternations are transitive meet/meet with, talk (to/with) and make love
(to/with).
As we saw, transitive hug and fight support preferential reciprocity with their
collective entry. Evidence for the plain reciprocity of “hug with” and fight with
comes from contrasts like Sue fought (?with) the disease, where the infelicity of
the with construction is evidence for its symmetry. Based on such cases, we have
assumed that constructions like fight with support plain alternations.35
Under the assumption that fight with supports plain reciprocity, we derive the
following meanings for the bc protopredicate fight:

Jfightiv K = λ e.λ z.⟨e,z⟩ ∈ Jfightbc KC collective

Jfighttv K = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x,y⟩ ∈ Jfightbc KB binary, non-symmetric
Jfight_withK = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x+y⟩ ∈ Jfightbc KC binary, symmetric

Summarizing, we have three general derivational strategies:

(70) Deriving lexical denotations from protopredicates: Let P be a protopred-
icate of type b, c or bc. From P we derive a unary collective predicate PPuc ,
a non-symmetric binary predicate Rns P and a symmetric binary predicate RP ,
s

which are defined as follows:

PPuc = λ e.λ z.⟨e,z⟩ ∈ JPKC the collective part of P, if defined
ns B
RP = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x,y⟩ ∈ JPK the binary part of P, if defined
RsP = λ e.λ x.λ y.⟨e,x+y⟩ ∈ JPKC the binary predicate based on the collective part of
P, if defined

An important feature of this system concerns protopredicates of type bc. As

discussed in Section 3.5, for such protopredicates we have not presupposed any
logical connection between the “B-part” and the “C-part”. The connection between
these parts is regulated by the preference that is formulated in (58). For instance, for
the protopredicate hug, this preference is stated as follows (cf. (56)):
35 This tentative assumption requires more evidence. However, further analysis of symmetry/plain
reciprocity with “with” constructions would go beyond the scope of the present study. Dimitriadis
(2008) and Siloni (2012) treat “with” constructions in Greek and Hebrew as cases of plain reciprocity
(“discontinuous reciprocity”). By contrast, Rákosi (2008) proposes that predicates like fight with
in Hungarian are not symmetric, hence, in our terms, they might not support plain alternations.
Kruitwagen et al.’s experiments show that in Dutch vechten tegen (“fight against”) is not in plain
alternation with collective vechten (“fight”), but they do not study constructions like vechten met
(“fight with”).

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(71) Typhug1 (e,x+y) ∝ ∣{⟨u,v⟩ ∈ {x,y}2 ∶ u =/ v and hug2 (e,u,v)}∣

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uc and hug = Rns
where hug1 = Phug 2 hug
Thus, for a given sum x+y and an event e, we check how many of the pairs among
⟨x,y⟩ and ⟨y,x⟩ are in the B part of hug in e. The larger this number is, the stronger the
tendency of speakers is to have the sum x+y in the C part of hug in the same event.
This tendency, rather than being logically or grammatically derived, is assumed to be
encoded as a preferential property of the concepts associated with bc protopredicates.
The system above specifies protopredicate denotations (69) and three ways in
which they derive denotations of lexical predicates (70). To verify that our system
derives the Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization as a corollary, we formally restate
the RSG in (18) as follows:

(72) Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization (RSG, formal): Let P be a proto-

predicate of one of types c or bc, with P and R the corresponding predicates
s.t. P = PPuc , and R is either Rns s
P or RP . The following conditions are equivalent:

(i) Symmetry — for every model, for all e, x and y:

JRK(e,x,y) ⇔ JRK(e,y,x).
(ii) Plain reciprocity — for every model, for all e, x and y:
JPK(e,x+y) ⇔ JRK(e,x,y) ∧ JRK(e,y,x).

Proof: For simplicity, we abbreviate Rns = Rns s s

P and R = RP . There are two cases
to consider:

1. The protopredicate P is of type c. In this case R = Rs by definition, since Rns

is undefined. And any Rs satisfies (i) and (ii) by definition (70).
2. The protopredicate P is of type bc. If R = Rs , then again, (i) and (ii) are both
satisfied by definition. Otherwise R = Rns . In this case, we show that neither (i)
nor (ii) holds. For instance, in a model where JPbc K = {⟨e,c+d⟩,⟨e,c,d⟩}, we
have JRns K(e,c,d) but not JRns K(e,d,c), hence (i) fails. Further, JPuc K(e,c+d)
holds but JRns K(e,d,c) does not, hence (ii) also fails.

We conclude that (i) and (ii) are equivalent. Thus, the RSG is supported by the
system of protopredicates that we have defined. Specifically, in this system, lexical
predicates with meanings like “thank each other” or Xhug (section 2.3) cannot be
derived:

i. Transitive thank is non-symmetric. To derive this non-symmetric predicate

in alternation with a unary-collective entry, the protopredicate thank would
have to be of type bc. However, as we saw, models for bc protopredicates

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allow denotations like {⟨e,c+d⟩,⟨e,c,d⟩}, ruling out plain reciprocity. As a
result, a unary thank would not mean “thank each other”, which as we saw is
in plain alternation with transitive thank.
ii. The binary entry of the hypothetical verb Xhug was postulated to be sym-
metric similarly to “hug with” (Xhug2 , note 12). For this to be the case, we
would need to derive this binary meaning from the C part of a protopredicate.
This would entail that the unary entry of Xhug shows plain reciprocity with
its binary entry, contrary to the assumption.

A sophisticated question here is why some bc protopredicates should not still

be restricted by additional meaning postulates, which might create plain reciprocity
relations or symmetry effects that do not follow from the type system of protopredi-
cates. The current approach and the proof above rely on the assumption that such
meaning postulates are not available. Languages are assumed to own a type system
that encodes the conceptual property of “collectivity” by the label c, but encoding of
plain reciprocity or symmetry by predicate-specific meaning postulates is assumed
to be impossible.

5 Conclusion

In a new analysis of lexical reciprocity and its relations with symmetry, this paper
elucidated the notion of truth-conditionally symmetric predicates. As we observed,
these predicates are connected to their reciprocal alternates in a logical relation
that was referred to as plain reciprocity. This was contrasted with non-symmetric
predicates, which show weaker relations with their reciprocal counterparts. The
emerging Reciprocity-Symmetry Generalization (RSG) led us to treat symmetric
predicates as semantic images of collective predicate meanings. This treatment is
conjectured to reflect a language universal that accounts for all cases of predicate
symmetry. By focusing on plain alternations, the RSG also specifies a complementary
domain of reciprocal alternations where formal semantics plays a weaker role. It was
proposed that non-plain reciprocal alternations are all preferential: the meanings of
the unary and the binary entries are only connected by typicality principles, similar
to those that characterize the connections between other concepts. Preferential
reciprocals are not logically expressible by their non-symmetric counterparts, and
their logical features are tied to meanings of specific entries or to the individuation
of collective events.
At a more general level, I believe that this paper has a hopeful message for
theories of lexical meaning and formal semantics. When paying close attention to the
underlying mathematical properties of intuitive linguistic notions like “reciprocity”

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or “symmetry”, we have a better chance to tease apart grammatical principles from

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other cognitive principles governing language use for expressing concepts.

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Symmetric predicates and reciprocal alternations

131.11zam.

early access
Yoad Winter
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
Utrecht University
Trans 10
3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands
y.winter@uu.nl

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